Stick TV show: Marc Maron and Mariana Trevino on golf and the sports underdog story

We all know that person who took up golf during the pandemic and is now obsessed. Like, properly obsessed, as if it’s their religion and personality rolled into one.

According to Golf Australia, there’s been a 19 per cent growth in club memberships in the five years to June 2024, so you’re not imagining if you think the sport is coming up in conversation more and more.

So, it’s actually a bit of a surprise that there hasn’t been a corresponding uptick in golf-themed screen projects. Sure, there’s the Happy Gilmore sequel coming next month, and Caddyshack is still constantly referenced, but where are the rest?

“People who love golf, love golf,” Marc Maron told The Nightly. The actor, comedian and very popular podcaster is in the new Apple streaming series, Stick, which stars Owen Wilson as a hasbeen pro golfer who is now selling gear and hustling people in bars in cahoots with his old caddy, Mitts (Maron).

Maron has never been a golf person, but the production sent him a bunch of clubs, and even taught him the basics. He liked driving the cart around.

“I definitely got the club out,” he said. “I was hitting balls around, and I tried to learn how to hold the club, and do all that stuff. I have yet to pursue golf, but I’m equipped to do so.”

Maron’s friend, fellow comedian Andrew Santino, ribbed him when he got the Stick gig. “One of them is very mad at me that I got the role,” Maron said. “I saw him last night, he was kind of like, ‘You don’t know anything about golf!’, and I was like, ‘What are you so made about, do you want to do it?’.

“But he said he would take me out to the course and show me some stuff.”

He and Santino are still friends, obviously, but perhaps Santino shouldn’t count on Maron hitting the green anytime soon. He said that while he had a resistance to the sport for years – “I thought it was ridiculous” – having now spent time on the course and with professional golfers, he gets it now.

“But I don’t know that I have the patience to do it,” he confessed.

Wilson is a well-known golf fan, which makes him ideal for the role of Pryce Cahill, but if you’re more like Maron, a love for putting is not a requisite for the show.

In the same way that you don’t need to be a football fan to be into Ted Lasso, a gridiron tragic to follow Friday Night Lights, a basketball diehard to watch Running Point or a baseball aficionado to cheer for A League of their Own, Moneyball or Field of Dreams.

There was also Maron’s previous show GLOW, about a group of women wrestlers trying to start a league and gain attention in the 1980s. No wrestling appreciation necessary.

It’s the human stories that power these sports-centred projects. The gameplay is a little extra pizazz, and kudos to Stick for making scenes of competitive golf seem exciting to the sceptic.

In Stick, you’re not just barracking for Wilson’s Cahill to find purpose in his life, years after he bombed out of his final professional tournament after a personal loss, which then triggered the breakdown of his marriage to Amber-Linn (Judy Greer).

When the show begins, Cahill is rudderless, but he gets excited when he spies a teenage kid, Santi (Peter Dager), hitting balls at the driving range. Santi has a prodigious gift and can knock a ball 300 metres away with precision.

Cahill wants to mentor Santi and strikes a deal with his mum, Elena (Mariana Trevino), to take him on the road and help him qualify for an amateur tournament. So the three of them, plus Mitts and Zero (Lilli Kay), a girl Santi meets along the way, packs off into Mitt’s camper van.

It’s a tight squeeze and tensions are running high. Everyone in the van has something to prove, or are trying to overcome a loss, and the show makes a persuasive side to be on all their sides. They’re the underdogs in more ways than one.

Cahill is still dealing with no longer living the life he envisaged, and Mitts is grieving for his wife.

“What struck me was there was a core of grief that runs through both (my character) and Owen’s character, and I thought that was very interesting to build in a heartfelt, kind of comedic way, for these characters to move through that, and also to be there for each other,” Maron said.

Elena and Santi are also coping with loss, albeit abandonment rather than death, with Elena’s husband and Santi’s father having run off some years earlier. That man’s absence is why Santi, who had been a junior champion, stopped playing.

“Sometimes you put your life on hold just because something bad happened to you, or you have a big grief or loss,” Trevino, a Mexican actor best known to English-speaking audiences for her roles in Narcos Mexico and Tom Hanks movie A Man Called Otto, said.

She loves a sports underdog story because it connects us to something more. “There’s something very primal and very emotional about rooting for someone who’s taking themselves to a limit and conquering themselves, and having a victory in this contained space, in this controlled game.”

Stick is streaming on Apple TV+ on June 4